Willful Blindness
by Alakata
Summary: 10 years after Harry Potter left her class for the final time, Sarah Devlin muses on how easy it is to convince yourself that nothing's wrong. One-shot.


DISCLAIMER: Not rich and still in school. Alas, I don't own Harry. I just get to play with him for a while.

SUMMARY: One of Harry's school teachers realises just how easy it is to convince yourself that you're right, that nothings wrong, because things like that happen to people in stories, not to people you know.

_"He means well" is useless unless he does well._

The name 'Harry Potter' had always been a synonym for the word 'weird' in the eyes of his classmates and teachers.

Oh, it wasn't that he was a _bad _kid - most of the teachers agreed that he was one of the better pupils, at least in terms of behaviour, despite what Petunia and Vernon Dursley said about him - and wasn't _their_ son a _right_ horror? No, Harry Potter for the most part sat as far into the corner as he could, and it was so darn easy to forget about him, really, he was that quiet. It was just that odd things happened around him all the time, and they surely couldn't all be coincidences? There was that time Mrs Williamson had claimed he'd turned her hair blue, of course, but then, she'd always hated him, and how could he have _done_ it? It was nonsense, naturally. And that time he'd been found climbing on the roof (And how on earth had he managed to get up _there_, they'd really never know) and that time Malcolm Rockwell had a seizure mere minutes after insulting Potter, despite the doctors saying he was perfectly healthy...

Yes, Harry Potter was a mystery to them all, an intellectual curiosity to those who had never had to teach the lonely little child, and a right headache to those who _had_. What with the odd things that kept happening around him, and sorting out the trouble his cousin Dudley and his cronies caused chasing around after him, and having to listen to Petunia and Vernon Dursley alternately praise their son to the high heavens and degrade young Potter, even those who liked the lonely little child were hard-pressed not to take it out on him occasionally.

He was an easy target, after all. It was plain to see, even from five minutes with them, that his guardians wouldn't be in to complain if they shouted at Harry a little more often than they did the other children. He made it so easy. Always coming in late to school (_Dudley Dursley was always on time, and didn't they live in the same house?_), falling asleep in class (_He always seemed so tired, like he never got enough sleep_), never trying hard on his homework (_His was always incomplete and messy, whilst Dursley's was always perfect... but Dudley Dursley had never shown any intellectual brilliance_), not trying at all in class (_Sometimes it seemed as though he was __**trying**__ to do worse than Dudley, but that was ridiculous, wasn't it?_)

And the other children ... Well, children had never been very tolerant of people's differences, no matter when or where they were, and for those who found themselves on the outside life at school could be both lonely and hard to cope with. And Harry Potter was an outsider in every sense of the word. Dudley Dursley was the undisputed leader of that year, with his little gang of thugs behind him, and if you wanted to be popular (and not end up with a black eye) you did what they said... And nothing they ever said about Harry Potter was good news for Harry. Anyone who tried to be friends with Harry was quickly ostracised, and it would be hard for a saint to put up with that, let alone young children who wanted nothing better than to fit in and be popular. It didn't help that he always wore clothes that were way too big for him, and looked like they were second-hand - as though his parents were poor and couldn't afford to buy him better (_But he lived with the Dursleys, and Dudley came into school in designer brands on non-uniform day_), and those glasses he always wore were terrible - huge circles that swamped his thin little face. And he was always so clumsy, tripping over and banging into things as though he couldn't see what was right in front of him - but always insisting he was perfectly alright, as though he was used to worse and not complaining about it...

It was a grim picture, all put together like that. All those little things that she had missed or disregarded when she was still teaching him, those little things that had seemed so insignificant or annoying but not really important. They weren't all blind, they'd all seen it, but reasoned it away. The Dursleys wouldn't _do _ that, would they? They were the epitome of normal. They lived and breathed normal. It wouldn't be _normal_ to abuse a child like that.

But thinking back on Harry's face every time she had praised him, his happy blush and the way his face lit up as though no-one had ever said something like that to him before, the way he'd always muttered about how his Aunt and Uncle wouldn't believe him if he told them about something that was really Dudley's fault, she knew that they had been wrong about them.

Horribly, terribly _wrong_.

The newspaper slipped out of fingers that were suddenly numb, and there it was, the headline that had started this entire recollection...

**LITTLE WHINGING SHOCKED**

_Prominent businessman Vernon Dursley jailed for 15 years for child abuse..._


End file.
